[LLVMdev] Is there room for another build system?

[Chris Lattner]

On Jul 30, 2008, at 11:09 AM, Óscar Fuentes wrote:

> Chris Lattner <clattner at apple.com> writes:
>
>> Ok.  Killing off autoconf would be a huge bonus, but should probably
>> be done as a second step.
>
> My plan is a staged one:
>
> First, support MSVC++.

> Second, implement what `configure' does now. MSVC++ users would be the
> first ones to take advantage of this, instead of the current hack  
> Visual
> Studio does.

> Finally, add capabilities for replacing current hand-made makefiles on
> all platforms.

>
> Once the work is done, killing off autoconf and hand-made makefiles is
> up to you. CMake can live with them and the amount of maintenance work
> it adds is minimal.

Ok, this sounds like a great plan.  I'm mostly aiming for this to be  
done in a series of incremental steps, rather than as a big bang :).   
Your plan sounds great!

>>> 1. General LLVM users: Are you so happy with `configure' and hand- 
>>> made
>>> makefiles that you wont consider an alternative? If you are
>>> interested,
>>> I can steer my work to cover all platforms.
>>
>> I would prefer to kill off makefiles if we have something better.  We
>> really only want to support one build system.
>
> My knowledge of the LLVM build system is far from complete, but right
> now there is one feature which I think is tricky to implement on  
> CMake:
> if you add/remove a source file, the build system we have now does the
> right thing. In CMake, you are required to update the list of source
> files on the CMakeLists.txt file.

I don't have a problem with this, this is acceptable.

>>> One trick is that we want to keep llvm-config and the
>> 'LINK_COMPONENTS' system used when building tools.  I am sure cmake
>> can handle this, but I just wanted to mention that it is important.
>
> Actually, I plan to use llvm-config (and LINK_COMPONENTS) even for VC 
> ++
> users :-). Probably as an alternative, as some Visual Studio users  
> would
> complain if Perl is a requirement for building LLVM.

Cool!  Thanks for working on this!

-Chris